I Design Corn Mazes for a Living. Here’s the One That Really Keeps Me Up at Night.

Consider the corn maze. Among the bounty of “fall girlie” activities we enjoy this time of year—apple picking, pumpkin spicing, m-fing decorative gourd worship—the winding labyrinth of drying corn stalks that many farms offer as part of their autumn festivities gets less love than it should. That might be because you remember it as kind of boring—an easy amble meant mostly for kids that’s liable to leave your boots muddy and, contra the advertising, doesn’t usually come with any food. Point me to the cider donuts?

But I’m here, freshly emerged from the field, to tell you that you’re wrong. Corn mazes these days are awesome. There are mazes in the shape of President Lincoln, the solar system, football mascots, and even a functional QR Code. In fact, this fall may represent a high point in the art form: In conjunction with her new album and book, both titled Not That Fancy, country music legend and The Voice judge Reba McEntire has had her head clear-cut through corn stands across this fine country, and you, like me, can spend an afternoon navigating her hair and face, that much closer to the mind of a goddess.

After my visit to the Reba maze hosted at Von Thun Farms in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, I had to know more about how this rustic wonder was created, so I reached out to Logan Bench, CTO of the MAiZE, a firm out of Utah that’s responsible for the Reba campaign and that designs sophisticated custom mazes for over 300 farmer clients across the U.S. and Canada. We talked about the art and science of maze creation, the future of the “agritainment” industry, Bench’s personal design Holy Grail, and just how a blank, tasseled canvas of corn makes him feel. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Bryan Lowder: Can you explain what your company the MAiZE does? I saw this term “agritainment,” which I’d never heard before, on the website—what’s that?

Logan Bench: Agritainment is a word that we created. It’s just the general idea of bringing people to the farm and making it fun. We do that through corn mazes and a bunch of other attractions, like a pig race or pumpkin bowling. Some of these farms have upwards of 40 or 50 other attractions that go with the corn maze, but the corn maze is definitely the flagship attraction that draws most people in.

How does someone become a corn maze designer? Did you get any training in a related field?

My story’s kind of unique. I went to school to be a graphic designer. The owner of the MAiZE is my brother-in-law, and when he started his company, he had the farm skills and knew how to plant corn. I did not, but I definitely had the design skills. As his company grew, we started working together to create a system where we could custom-design a corn maze. It’s really cool because it’s agriculture merging with technology in an artistic way. Every design we do is handmade, it’s all custom, it lives and dies, and so it’s kind of like art that is only meant to be seen for a few months and then it goes away.

OK, so take me through the process. When you are thinking about designing a new maze, what are the basic considerations that you start with? Is it size? Is there some way you judge complexity, or is it just the theme?

I love what you said because the No. 1 thing we always start with is size. Some of these farms will want to put a menagerie of elements in their maze. They want a flag and they want a Statue of Liberty, and they want this and that, and just, quite honestly, we have to tell them there’s not enough room. You’d need a 50-acre fill to do that, and so our biggest limitation and our biggest navigator, right at the beginning, is size. Do you have a 2-acre maze or do you have a 7-acre maze? That really determines how much detail we can put in there.

With the Reba McEntire mazes, we have a version of her face that fits better in a smaller field, a little less detail, less lines. And then we have a more detailed design that will fit better in a 7-, 8-, 9-acre maze. It’s really interesting because it’s kind of pixels on a TV screen, only it’s corn stalks per foot rather than pixels per inch. Most farmers will plant rows spaced 30 inches apart, and that’s kind of our baseline, but some plant more densely, which creates more corn, which will then create more pixels and detail. It truly is kind of like a TV screen with corn stalks.

How do you and the farm owners decide what maze design you want to do?

Generally, most corn maze owners actually struggle to know what the design should be every year. Maybe once in a while it’s like, Oh yeah, I really love this design, let’s do it. But I would say the majority of owners, and even us here locally in Utah on our farm, have to get creative every year to try to think, “OK, well, what’s our design going to be next year?” So what our company does a lot of the time is get a national campaign going, where we actually partner with someone like Reba and get their team on board, and then we get a handful of our farms that want to participate in a national campaign. Farmers really like that because a lot of the hard work’s already done, and they also get national recognition, and being able to partner with someone like Reba is a really cool thing.

Tell us a little bit about the tech that you use in the design process. What are the steps that you use when you go from the idea to the actual design that then is cut?

Step 1 is just, obviously, like we talked about, size. Then, we throw it into a vector design program. We have some proprietary patterns and grids that are sized to the customer’s field. And really, it’s not rocket science, it’s just a giant connect-the-dots game like on the back of a cereal box, but just way more intense. We pretty much throw that in a vector editor and start connecting dots and breaking apart the maze.

We actually have a word called “mazify.” I don’t even know if it’s a real word, but we’ll actually do the design work first, and we don’t turn it into a maze until the farmer or client falls in love with the final version. We will then mazify it and cut it up and make it an actual challenging maze to navigate. Because if you don’t do it in that order, you’ll be doing a lot of work over and over again.

With the Reba example, I assume that means that there was a complete sketch of her head, and then you go back and you add the dead ends and all of that at the end, right?

Yeah. The farm that you visited, we probably sent them two, three, four versions, and we went back and forth, and then, on the final one, that’s when we actually started breaking it apart and making it a “navigateable” maze. I’ve been making up a lot of words today. But we’ll go with it. We make it so the maze is functional and people can actually get lost, and that’s always the last step in the design process.

Do you have any guidelines about how many dead ends are too many, or about not being too complicated? At the one I did, there was an easy side and sort of the more complex Phase 2, they called it, and it was surprisingly complicated. Do you have any internal rules about how you don’t go too far for people?

Our secret sauce that we’ve learned over the years is most people actually don’t want to spend their entire evening in a maze, so we’ve learned that we can definitely make them too hard, but to kind of mitigate that, we create phases, like you mentioned—there’s actually a hard or shorter version of the maze. And a lot of our mazes will actually have two to three different phases, and so essentially there’s three different mazes, but it looks like one. And what that does is it gives the customer the option to say, “OK, I did Phase 1. I’m tired. I want to go get a corn dog.” Or if they want more, then they continue to Phase 2.

OK, so you’ve got your design. Could you talk about how the mazes are installed? What are the tools that are used, and how is it so precise?

When we cut a maze, there are two options, really. We can do GPS, which we’ll do if the corn is tall. But usually we really prefer to do the corn when it’s short—it’s just really laborious when the corn’s tall. If we’re consulting the farmers ahead, we’ll tell them to plant at a certain time, so when we show up, the corn is only 12 inches tall, maybe. A lot of people are surprised by that. We cut the corn when it’s really short, and then the corn will grow into the maze.

If we don’t use GPS, our more traditional way—and it’s really archaic, to be honest with you—is just connecting the dots to the giant grid system. Our accuracy is within 8 inches, which is more accurate than GPS. Just imagine the corn fill is a giant piece of graph paper, and then, in the field itself, there’s some flagging that goes on, and there’s some color coordinating that ties into the vector design that then overlays on some blueprints. It’s really not rocket science, but it is a ton of work. It’s a very tedious job, but it’s typically cut either by hand or by a tractor, depending on what the farmer has on site.

Are you excited about anything coming up, in terms of technology, for the industry?

Technology is just moving so fast that some of our designs are actually planted with a planting machine by GPS now. So that’s the new thing, and we will probably go more that direction. The planters actually are smart enough to see our designs and know what negative and positive spaces are. And then essentially it’s like a printer—it will just print the maze in seed format into the field. They call it precision planting, and so that’s kind of the new wave of technology in the corn maze/agritainment world.

OK, so back to your design work for a minute: Aside from Reba, which I’m sure has to be your most favorite one you’ve ever done, do you have any favorite designs that you’ve had a hand in creating, that are memorable to you?

I mean, Reba’s been really fun, and her team’s been so good to work with. I would say probably my most memorable one, though, was a farm in Canada. They were trying to put a QR Code in their corn maze. They wanted it to be scannable, and if it scanned, it would break the Guinness World Record as the largest scannable QR Code ever created. So we designed it for him, put a QR Code in the maze, and it was beautiful. To prove that it was scannable, Guinness flew up in helicopter to scan it, but it wouldn’t at first. They called me and said, “How do we get this to scan?” QR Codes are all about contrast, and so I was like, “OK, go rototill the dirt to make it darker—maybe that will help create more contrast.” They did, and when they flew up a few hours later, it scanned and broke the record.

Is there any sort of Holy Grail kind of maze that you dream about, but that would be really daunting to execute?

Oh, man. I mean, the most difficult pattern in the corn maze world is a honeycomb. They’re the hardest to design. They’re the hardest to navigate. They’re just challenging. Anytime someone’s like, “I want a bee,” I’m like, “Uh-oh.” Because they require precision on all angles, and so they’re really hard to center. It’s a whole thing. So anytime our designers get honeycombs, they’re like, “No.”

As far as things that we would love to design, it’s really fun to design mazes that a lot of people see. We’ve done Super Bowl mazes and Taylor Swift and things like that. And when we see them on TV, that’s kind of fun, because you’re like, “Oh, I designed that.” One time, I was actually watching the Super Bowl at my house, and they showed the maze on the TV, and I’m like, “Oh, that was designed on my laptop that’s literally sitting right there.” Those are the kind of fun moments where you feel like you’re making a small difference and people can see your work.

One thing that struck me when I visited one of your client’s farms is that it was incredibly packed. It was a holiday weekend as well, and I was just like, “God, this has to be a major part of this farm’s annual income.”

Yeah. I mean, a lot of these farms make way more money off the agritainment piece of their business than actual farming. The one thing that a lot of people don’t realize, though, is that event management is a lot of work. There’s insurance and customers and employees and all these things that you just have to deal with. You’re dealing with Mother Nature too, so if it rains, you just lose. It’s a business model that’s not for the faint of heart.

After working with corn as your artistic medium for so long, do you still like to eat it?

That’s funny. Yes. I love corn on the cob. A lot of our farms actually serve different varieties of corn on the cob at the farm. But I don’t dislike or like corn any more or less … I will admit, though, that if I’m driving in the middle of nowhere and I see a bunch of random cornfields, that I may get a little anxiety. I’m like: “Oh no, that’s so much work.”